The Lost Testament (10 page)

News, especially bad news, travels quickly in Cairo, and rumors of the torture and killing of a local trader were already sweeping through the souk.

Mahmoud Kassim had a cleaner-cum-housekeeper who visited his property every day, and her echoing screams when she walked into his bedroom had alerted almost everybody in the street. The Egyptian police were already investigating the murder, and had several firm leads, according to the gossip in the coffeehouses.

Abdul frankly doubted that, because he had been very careful to ensure he had left no physical traces of his presence anywhere in the property, apart from the dead body. But the uproar over the killing was unwelcome to him and to his employer.

“You should have disposed of the body, you fool.”

Abdul was not used to being spoken to like that, and immediately his temper flared.

“I couldn’t dispose of the body. Walking through the streets of Cairo carrying a corpse would have been far more dangerous than leaving him where he died. It’s just unfortunate that this cleaning woman went into the house and found him so quickly.”

“The word ‘unfortunate’ doesn’t even begin to cover it. You do realize it’s possible that this other dealer, this man Husani, will now be on his guard?”

Abdul shook his head and walked a little farther down the deserted alley, holding his mobile phone to his ear.

“Not necessarily. There is no obvious reason why he should assume that Mahmoud’s death was anything to do with the object he bought from him.”

The deep voice at the other end of the line gave a snort of disbelief.

“You’d better be right,” he snapped. “You have not fulfilled this contract in a satisfactory manner to date. If you do not resolve this matter, and quickly, we may be forced to take further steps.”

“Are you threatening me?” Abdul asked, his voice suddenly cold with barely suppressed anger.

“Yes, of course I am,” the man replied simply. “You’re not the only contractor in Cairo. Unless you deliver the parchment to me within the next twenty-four hours, we will terminate the contract and issue appropriate orders to another person. Orders that may indirectly include you. You have been warned.”

Before Abdul could even begin to formulate a reply, the other man ended the call.

In a large and comfortable house on the southern outskirts of Cairo, Jalal Khusad, a heavily built and prosperous-looking middle-aged man, his face dominated by a large and very black beard, looked at his mobile phone with an irritated expression on his face. Then, with a gesture of disgust, he tossed the phone onto the tooled leather top of his mahogany desk.

Things were not going as he had planned. As a senior member of P2 in Egypt, he knew of the Englishman by reputation, and he didn’t want to disappoint him. He couldn’t afford to.

The matter had seemed simple enough and should not have been difficult to complete. All his contractor Abdul had been told to do was recover a single piece of parchment and eliminate whoever had possession of it. The assassin was well-known throughout Cairo and even elsewhere in Egypt for his success rate. How had he failed?

And now Khusad had to pass the information up the line. A call that he was dreading.

He opened a small notebook bound in red leather and opened it to a particular page. On it were a series of numbers. On first appearance they looked like rows of telephone numbers, but were simply a low-security way he had devised of concealing the one genuine telephone number—a number that actually ran diagonally across the grid.

Below the grid were three time periods during which the recipient would be available to take his call. Khusad didn’t know precisely who his contact was, but he knew he was a senior person within the Vatican, and assumed that he would have to leave the Holy See in order to use his mobile phone without his conversation being overheard or his location identified. And, allowing for the time difference between Cairo and Rome, the man should be available right then.

Khusad ran one stubby finger down the list until he came to the third number that, like all the others, began with a zero. Then he dialed the digits that appeared in a diagonal line running downward and to the right from that initial number. He heard the ringing tone of the recipient’s phone, and then his call was answered by a soft and heavily accented voice.

“
Si
.”

Their rules for communication were simple and inviolable. Unless it was completely unavoidable, neither man would use either his own name or the names of any of the other people involved in the operation, mention any dates or place-names, or refer to the relic directly. Both parties doubted if any of their calls were monitored, but it was never worth taking a chance.

“We don’t yet have it,” Khusad began, speaking in French, “but we think we know where it is.”

“That is not what I wanted to hear,” the other man replied. “You told me that your agent, this man you had hired, was acting immediately. And that he was competent.”

Khusad had been expecting anger in response to his call, but instead the voice in the earpiece sounded nervous and disturbed, almost frightened.

“His reputation suggested that he is normally very competent,” the Egyptian replied, “and you will recall your instructions were to employ an outside contractor and not one of my own men to ensure complete deniability. In the event, I do not think a member of my organization would necessarily have fared any better. The man followed my instructions to the letter but in the interval between your orders being issued and him obtaining access to the premises, the goods had been passed on to a third party.”

There was a brief silence while the recipient of the call digested this piece of information.

“So what of the original custodian? Is he aware of the significance and importance of the object?”

“As far as we have been able to discover, he had no idea what it was or why anyone would be interested in it,” Khusad replied. “And now he has no knowledge of it whatsoever.”

“You are quite certain of that?”

“He will not be telling anyone anything that he knew.”

The man in Italy was silent for a moment, then spoke again.

“I suppose that has to be considered good news, in the circumstances. And now your agent will be approaching this third party you claim to have identified?”

“Exactly. I have told him we need to conclude this operation within twenty-four hours.”

“You may need to retain this agent you have hired for rather longer than that. Our monitoring system here has detected another instance of the same search term being used, and we will expect you to take the same action with this individual as with the first custodian.”

That was a piece of news Khusad had definitely not expected, or wanted, to hear.

“Perhaps this other search was initiated by the person who now has possession of the object,” he suggested.

“Not necessarily. Do you know the occupation of the new custodian? And I need his name.”

“I understand that he’s just another market trader. His name is Anum Husani.”

“Then you will definitely need to take additional action to ensure that this matter remains as confidential as we require. There is now at least one other person involved in this.”

“How can you be certain of that?”

There was another pause before the reply came.

“Because the last search that our system detected originated from Cairo Museum. And we are also tracking an e-mail sent by that person. His name is Ali Mohammed.”

Antonio Morini, sitting in civilian clothes at a table in a small café near the Tiber, ended the call and slipped the mobile phone back into the pocket of his light jacket. He had been worried about just how specific he should be in his responses, because the Englishman had emphasized so forcefully the need for security in all communications, and especially during telephone calls, to protect everyone involved. But he had come to the conclusion that he needed to risk spelling out the name of the man who’d originated the new search—indeed that he really had no other option. He had to ensure that the correct action would be taken.

The Italian priest was becoming more concerned with every hour that passed. What had seemed at first to be a simple and uncomplicated, albeit brutal, operation—to locate, seize and possibly destroy a piece of ancient parchment, and to ensure that the owner of the relic was in no position to tell anyone anything about it, ever—was beginning to assume unwelcome proportions.

He had prayed for guidance every night, and by summoning up every scrap of his faith he’d been able to rationalize the actions he’d been ordered to take, the instruction to eliminate the market trader in Cairo, telling himself that a dealer in relics was absolutely the last person who should have access to the parchment. If the man had realized what he held in his hands, and decided to sell it to the highest bidder or even went public with the contents, the consequences would have been catastrophic. It was a case of measuring the life of one unimportant but potentially dangerous individual against the spiritual well-being of tens of millions of worshippers around the world.

But now that man was dead, as the Englishman had instructed, and still the parchment hadn’t been recovered. Worse than that, it appeared that another person, a second market trader, in fact, was in possession of the relic, and somehow he had managed to involve a scientist in a museum in Cairo. And that man had contacted a professional colleague about the parchment. Knowledge of the object was spreading uncomfortably fast.

Morini regretted the loss of even one life—as a priest all human life was sacred to him—but the situation he found himself in offered no relief. If he didn’t relay the Englishman’s orders, far more than just a couple of men would die, and he knew it. Feeling a dull ache of revulsion course through his body, he muttered another brief prayer, then took out his mobile again. He knew he had to pass on the latest developments to the Englishman. It would not, he anticipated, be a very enjoyable conversation.

He raised his hand and ordered another
caffé latte
. When the drink was on the table in front of him and he was satisfied that nobody was close enough to be able to overhear any part of his conversation, he dialed the number.

As before, the call was answered by a quiet English voice that simply said “Yes?” and Morini glanced around him, checking his surroundings once more before he said anything. Then he briefly explained the new developments. When he’d finished, the man he’d called didn’t respond for a few moments, and when he did Morini could hear the cold, suppressed anger in his voice, though his first words were a surprise.

“I apologize. With what you’ve told me, it’s very clear that my agent in Cairo and the contractor he selected were inadequate, and I will take steps to remedy this, but only when the present operation has been concluded.”

Morini felt a fresh pang of guilt, guessing that whatever penalties the Englishman intended to visit upon the two men in Egypt would almost certainly be painful and possibly fatal.

“So we have two further targets to take care of,” the English voice continued, “and the precise location of the relic is still uncertain. It could be in the possession of the second custodian, or with the third, at the museum itself. In a few minutes I will send you a message with further orders. Anything else?”

“Yes,” Morini replied. “There is one other matter, which concerns the scientist. He has supplied some details of the relic by e-mail to a professional colleague in England.”

“What details?”

“According to the intercept program, only two or three words.”

“It might only be two or three words, but that could be quite enough to be a real threat to you. I will make arrangements to attend to that person as well. As he’s in England, there will be no need for you to get involved.”

“It’s a woman,” Morini pointed out.

“Immaterial. When you reply to my text message, include everything you know about both the e-mail and the recipient.”

For a couple of minutes after he had ended the call, Morini just sat at the table, the mobile phone still held in his right hand and his eyes staring vacantly in front of him.

He knew he was only acting as a conduit, relaying orders that had been formulated and decided upon by the Englishman who was in overall charge of the operation, as the protocols had stipulated. But he was still fighting a losing moral battle with his conscience. He knew with absolute certainty that the orders he had previously passed on to the man in Cairo had resulted in one death. But on the other side of the coin was the almost inevitable catastrophe of global proportions if the relic could not be recovered and its contents were made public. And that was a possibility that he simply could not tolerate.

Ever since Father Gianni’s revelations, Morini had viewed everything about the Vatican and the Catholic Church in a very different light. But despite that, he still believed in the fundamental goodness of his religion, and knew that he would do whatever was necessary to protect it. The only thing he couldn’t understand was why the damning—and damnable—parchment hadn’t been destroyed centuries earlier.

The reality Morini personally was facing was that if the parchment were not recovered, he would be the one who would have to explain the sequence of events, and the inevitable consequences, to the Holy Father. And that was something he was desperate to avoid, at all costs.

*   *   *

The text message he’d been expecting arrived about five minutes later, and even before he read it, Morini had guessed the contents.

He read the text twice to ensure he hadn’t missed anything, then finished his coffee, paid the bill and left the café. Five minutes later, from another pay phone he hadn’t used before, his call to a mobile phone in Cairo was answered, and two minutes after that, he’d passed on the orders he had just been given.

Morini crossed himself as he ended the call, but in truth he was less concerned about the imminent deaths of two men in Egypt than he was about what the scientist had done. Ali Mohammed had e-mailed a woman in England, a woman—the software had informed him—who worked at the British Museum in London.

The leaks were getting worse and had now spread far beyond the borders of Egypt, and not for the first time he seriously doubted whether the contagion could be contained at all.